Chapter 34 Exercises

Conceptual Exercises

Exercise 34.1: Definition Mapping Collect five quotes from contemporary politicians that their opponents or media have called "populist." Apply Mudde's ideational definition rigorously to each quote. For each: - Does it invoke the people-elite distinction? - Does it claim to represent the "general will"? - Does it exhibit Manichean framing? - Classify each as: (a) clearly populist by the ideational definition, (b) populist-adjacent but not definitionally populist, or (c) misclassified as populist Write a 300-word justification for each classification.

Exercise 34.2: Left vs. Right Populism Comparison Choose one case of left populism (Podemos/Spain, SYRIZA/Greece, Morales/Bolivia, Sanders/US primary campaigns) and one of right populism (Orbán/Hungary, Le Pen/France, Trump/US, Meloni/Italy). Complete a structured comparison table addressing: - How is "the people" defined? - Who constitutes "the corrupt elite"? - What policy program accompanies the populist appeal? - What institutional changes, if any, were pursued in power? - How did media coverage shape the movement's development?

Exercise 34.3: The CAP Survey in Practice The following are five adapted CAP survey items. Rate yourself on each (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree), then rate a political figure of your choice as you believe they would answer: 1. "Politicians should always follow the wishes of the people, even if they think they know better." 2. "The political elite have too much power and ignore ordinary citizens." 3. "The differences between ordinary people and the political class are larger than differences among ordinary people." 4. "What this country needs is strong leadership that implements the will of the people without delay." 5. "The current political establishment has failed the people and needs to be replaced." Discuss: What did the exercise reveal about the instrument's assumptions? What might it miss?

Analytical Exercises

Exercise 34.4: Build a Populism Dictionary Using the Rooduijn-Pauwels framework, construct your own populism dictionary for American English political speech. Your dictionary should: - Include at least 30 terms/phrases in the "anti-elite" category - Include at least 30 terms/phrases in the "people-centric" category - Include at least 15 terms/phrases capturing Manichean framing For each term, justify its inclusion. Then identify at least 5 terms that are ambiguous (could be populist or not depending on context) and explain the disambiguation strategy you would use.

Exercise 34.5: Historical Case Application Apply the three-cause framework (economic anxiety, cultural backlash, institutional distrust) to one historical populist movement: - The US Populist Party of the 1890s - Peronism in Argentina (1946–1955) - McCarthyism in the US (1950–1954) - The German NSDAP's rise (1928–1933) For each causal factor, identify the specific historical conditions that activated it and the evidence you would use to weight the factor's relative importance.

Exercise 34.6: Democratic Backsliding Indicators Using Hungary as the primary case and one of (Brazil, India, Turkey, Poland) as a comparison, create a structured analysis of democratic backsliding trajectories. For each country, track changes on at least four dimensions: judicial independence, press freedom, electoral integrity, civil society space. What explains the different outcomes (deeper erosion in Hungary vs. more resilient institutions elsewhere)?

Applied Research Exercise

Exercise 34.7: Coding Whitfield's Rhetoric Below is an excerpt from a hypothetical Whitfield campaign speech. Apply two measurement approaches: (a) the Rooduijn-Pauwels dictionary you built in Exercise 34.4, and (b) a structured coding scheme where you identify people-references, elite-references, and Manichean contrasts sentence by sentence.

"The people of Texas know the difference between someone who's been in Washington for thirty years and someone who's actually worked the land, paid the bills, and worried about next year's harvest. The politicians don't want you to ask where the money goes — because if you follow the money, you'll find that every decision they make, every regulation they write, every committee they sit on, serves the same handful of donors and not one family in this county. That ends when we win. Because when we win, Texas is governed by Texans, not by think-tank experts who've never driven a tractor or run a small business."

Calculate the populism density score using your dictionary. Then write a 200-word reflection on what the dictionary approach captured and what it missed.

Reflection Questions

  1. The cultural backlash thesis suggests that populism is partly a response to genuine value change. If that's true, what are the implications for how mainstream parties should respond to populist challenges?

  2. Democratic backsliding typically happens slowly, through legal means, with each individual step seeming defensible in isolation. What institutional design features might make backsliding more visible and thus more politically costly?

  3. If you were advising Nadia Osei on the Garza campaign's research agenda, what three specific analytical questions would you prioritize, and what data would you use to answer them?